John 12: 20
Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks.
They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, "Sir, we wish to see Jesus."
Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus.
Jesus answered them, "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.
Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.
Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.
Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor.
"Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say -- 'Father, save me from this hour'? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.
Father, glorify your name." Then a voice came from heaven, "I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again."
The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, "An angel has spoken to him."
Jesus answered, "This voice has come for your sake, not for mine.
Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out.
And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself."
He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.
The crowd answered him, "We have heard from the law that the Messiah(1 remains forever. How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of Man?"
Jesus said to them, "The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you. If you walk in the darkness, you do not know where you are going.
While you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become children of light." After Jesus had said this, he departed and hid from them.
This may well be my final sermon. I'd like to begin with a polemic - perhaps an harangue. A rejoinder to the easy theology of the day. A kind of validation of the Bible as a thing in itself - a reification of divinity absorbing all necessary human devotion.
The purpose of scripture is to bring us into fellowship and life with Jesus. In my life and reading I've encountered people who've used at as an instrument of divination - holding a needle suspended on a thread over a passage in Ruth to see if they should marry. This practice of Bibliomancy - yes, that's the word, and it has a nice article in wikipedia is ancient and varied in different cultures, running the gamut of sacred books and poetry. Some people pretend to find a history of the world or the world's end - setting forth an amusing array of world leaders who must be the anti-Christ. There is often a a clamor to make the Bible's law the law of the land. As if this would usher in the golden age - like existed back in Neverland at no moment in history; as if Christ ever endorsed a political party or took policy positions and sent emissaries to local officials with bureaucratic proposals. Or as if the apostle Paul, in writing to the Galatians, concerning their appropriation of circumcision, tells them that the desire to be justified by the law (and therefore to use the law in place of the Holy Spirit) cuts them off from Christ - removes them from grace.
This desire to use the Bible as an authoritarian instrument is strong in our culture. The solemn intonation of "the Bible" with its attendant predicate "is clear" - and then, the appeal to emotion under cover of logic - a logic rife with ad hominems, false dilemmas, slippery slope fallacies - such cognitive dissonance that were it set to music would rival Schoenberg's late work. Yet invoked with such a straight face and earnestness of spirit: a certainty that if we don't heed their edict - as indicated by its preface "The Bible ... is clear" - then we are doomed to the lake of fire, social ostracism, and death by hangnail.
And I am here to tell you this morning that the testimony of 2000 years of church and world history - on down to histories of local institutions and individuals - testify to the fact that the one thing the Bible is not, is clear. Not for lack of trying. Not for lack of attempts at one size fits all - from papal infallibility to fundamentalist notions of inerrancy (which make God into a Schrodinger's cat - imprisoned inside an inerrant box, awaiting the inerrant key welded inerrantly by the inerrant individual, who, believing inerrantly inerrantly unlocks at the inerrant time in the inerrant way and delivers to us the inerrant word that cannot be misunderstood - once for all for all time - until which time we are left to speculate whether God is alive or dead inside - in thrall to the minions who guard the way - who like the Pharisees in the gospel, do not go in themselves and who get in the way of those who try).
And when I say that the purpose of scripture is to bring us into fellowship with Jesus, all this I've just said, is what I feel must be fought against. People use the Bible for everything but knowing him. How heartened I was years ago, when reading Calvin's institutes, that he said that Jesus remains unknown, hidden and idle from us until the Holy Spirit waters our minds and hearts. That the act of knowing Christ is not the act of assembling propositions but of encountering him along life's way. With his emphasis on the work of the Holy Spirit, I'd almost think Calvin was a pentecostal!
A manner of encounter pictured for us in the Emmaus road encounter, where he opens the disciples minds to understand what scripture says about him - not what scripture (and back then, before the epistles and gospels had themselves been written - but what is called the septuagint) - not what scripture says about the topics of the day, or how to be happy and fulfilled, or how to lose weight or plan your retirement or get out of debt. None of that. It is after all Christianity - not bibleanity, not financial services-anity, not getting my way-anity. No seven or twelve or 3 habits of successful wishfulfillment.
My whole life, I've thought, there must be something to knowing Jesus - but how?
Certainly, when we read the gospels, we encounter a man - who doesn't present himself as something other than himself - no press releases, no marketing. He says things that seem counterintuitive or intentionally dense - and this text today is like that.
Central to this passage is knowing Jesus as someone who draws all people to himself - while casting out the ruler of this world. On one side of this statement is an adage about the necessity of a seed to fall and die in order to bring about fruit; on the other side is truism about how impossible it is to work in the dark and the necessity of finishing work before sundown.
"Unless a seed fall to the ground and die, it abides alone."
I find this a requisite in hearing the scripture - to set aside the urgency of fitting the word into some preconceived understanding - to try hearing it, as if I'd never heard it. How easily we become trapped in our own cannon. When we get around this, we discover a richness we'd unsuspected was there. I find this works in painting and writing - the notion of killing your little darlings: otherwise the story stalls, the image becomes labored and contrived. And in life too - we have to let go of how we imagined our selves, imagined our lives. We let go of some fantasy to finally use the things we have - to say that what we have, how we are, is good enough. In object relations, they say that the theory must die before you can use it. Certainly in this passage, the notion of what a messiah was, what a son of man was, had to die - had to die, in order for Jesus to be that.
And the ruler of the world - the ancient rabbis didn't think of the "ruler or prince of the world" as the devil or Satan, per se, but as death - the fear of death - and how the fear of death rules our lives. The fear of death tightens us up inside. A miser fears the death of his fortune - and so tightens his grip on the money bag; a bully fears impotence and so tightens his grip on those who are weaker. In this gospel's final chapters - when Jesus is being questioned by Pilate, the real "ruler of the world is invoked" where Pilate is accused of not being the emperor's friend if he let's Jesus go, as well as a scene where all the rulers and people proclaim that they have no king but Caesar. And how isn't that the fear of death - because not being the emperor's friend isn't some unfortunate turn (well Pilate Caesar's just not that in to you) but is death itself: a political death at least and actual cessation of existence, probably in a painful way, at worst.
The promise here is if we let Jesus be lifted up (not on our terms or according to some worldly end) then we will truly live - like the seed that fell to the ground we'll no longer abide alone. The promise here is for thriving in our lives and living in God's abundance - or perceiving God's abundance where our first thought isn't "what is this among so many."
I think part of turning toward Jesus and away from the death that rules the world is that not only do we see our selves but we see others. Frederich Schleiermacher spoke of such fellowship as "stepping beyond the limits of [our] own personality and [taking] up the facts of other personalities into [our] own." Such an image bespeaks the hard shell of the seed being broken and allowing the nutrients of the earth to come in. It is a death - a death of going my own way, of believing the image constructed for me - letting the mask slip.
Finally there is the image of working in the light - and I suggest more so, letting the light work in you. In the Holy Spirit we hear with new ears and see with new eyes - as Calvin said. And what was the inert letter of scripture comes alive. What comes alive is Christ in our hearts and reaching out to Christ in each other, in love, in freedom. We find our redemption in growing into the multiplicity of God's image in us and in creation.
This image is ever expanding. As we see in this passage it is an image that kills our expectations while bringing to life realizations we could never imagine. Dead is the conquering messiah - who makes Jerusalem the new Rome; alive and active is the son of man who passes through the pale of death and returns - triumphant in love, subduing violence with healing the human soul. And throughout church history we see this, beginning in Acts - where Gentiles become part of God's image - a scandal in its time that baffles us today. Again and Again the Holy Spirit opens doors for groups formerly sequestered and denied - slaves, women, gays.
It is in God's generosity that the hope for all of us finds fulfillment. In our own strength, our own prejudices (no matter how affirmed by sellers of impotence medication), we abide alone. This passage give me hope; Jesus' words here meet the hunger of my soul - that I might be released from the buttons that have been pushed throughout my life - buttons that make me hate this person, buy this drink, read this book, vote this line, fall in line and take orders. What a world we live in - we're sucked in and blown out with barely time to think our actual thoughts. All this time we've been thinking mom's and dad's and grand pa's and the Sunday paper's and the TV's - but not our own thoughts. And this is the Messiah's promise - Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, that in him we find the space to be ourselves, finally, and live, even in dying.
As Sam Phillips sings:
Broken like a window
I see my blindness now
And I need love
Not some sentimental prison
I need God
Not the political church
I need fire
To melt the frozen sea inside me
I need love
In today's passage Jesus stood on the shore of that frozen sea - the frozen symbols of political and social stratification that freeze us up from going beyond ourselves, emerging from our living deaths and feeling the light on our face for the first time perhaps. And seeing that light in another - perhaps a prisoner, perhaps a lonely person, perhaps some homeless stranger - or someone known too well and too long. Lift up Jesus and cast out this world's rules.
I can't stand here all day. We must be on the way.
